Dead Silence (Stillwater Trilogy #1)(70)
Author: Brenda Novak

Kennedy chuckled at this response. He hadn’t asked her to apologize. Obviously, she was wrestling with her own conscience. “You liked her, didn’t you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you did. Like her, I mean.”

“I’ll admit she’s probably a better person than I expected.”

There was a grudging tone to Camille’s voice, but coming from his mother, it was still a huge admission.

“She has a good heart,” he said.

“She’s also very attractive.”

“Really?” He smiled to himself as he remembered Grace naked in the window. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You’ve noticed, all right. That’s what has me worried.”

Kennedy’s father said something in the background.

“What did Dad say?” Kennedy asked.

“That you’re thinking with another part of your anatomy and not your brain.”

Kennedy scowled. “I haven’t slept with her, if that’s what he’s getting at.”

Camille repeated what Kennedy had said, which elicited a bark of laughter. “Maybe not yet,” Otis muttered, sounding much closer to the phone.

“I heard that,” Kennedy said wryly.

His mother laughed. “Apparently, your father’s a bit skeptical of your motives.”

“Dad doesn’t need to worry about my motives. He needs to worry about getting well.”

Camille immediately sobered. “He knows that, Kennedy.”

“Tell him it’s okay with me,” Otis said. “You might not like it, Camille, but I don’t mind. If Grace Montgomery makes him happy, then I’m happy. He’s been a good boy his whole life, and I’m proud. Very—” his voice faltered “—proud.”

Kennedy’s throat constricted. His father had always been a stern man, a disciplinarian. He didn’t share his emotions. Even now, he’d used Camille as a conduit. But what he said made a profound impact.

“Did you hear him?” Camille asked softly.

“I did,” Kennedy replied. “But I won’t accept goodbye, Mom. You tell him that, okay? I want him to see my boys grow up.”

“He will.”

“Tell him I love him, too,” Kennedy added.

“It’s time to clean out the reverend’s office,” Grace said. Now that she’d decided to stay in Stillwater, she wanted to go ahead with her plans to put the past behind her.

Clay pursed his lips but didn’t immediately respond, so she turned to look out his kitchen window. A rooster very similar to the one she remembered from her childhood strutted in the yard among the hens, pecking at the dark earth. The barn she hated lurked right behind, its door yawning open. She grimaced at the sight of it, and looked beyond, to the creek, which evoked far pleasanter memories. Each summer, Clay had inflated old tire tubes and they’d floated down to the pond.

Too bad all the days of her childhood couldn’t have been as pleasant….

Clenching her jaw, she tried to find some small corner of her soul where she could stow the bitterness. But she was running out of room.

“I’m not sure we should change anything right now,” Clay said. “People around here are agitated enough, Grace. You know that.”

“But I can’t wait any longer,” she told him. “I have to be able to effect a change here, to feel like I’m finally in charge. Otherwise, it’s as if he still has some hold over this house, the land, us.” She had to vanquish him.

“What about Madeline?”

Madeline was the reason they couldn’t burn everything that had belonged to Barker, as Grace wished. “You can call her after we’re done, tell her you boxed up his stuff and put it in storage. If she wants it, she can take it.”

“I don’t think she’ll be happy about us doing something like that without including her. For all her talk about murder, deep down she still hopes he’s coming back.”

“She knows the chances of that.”

“Knowing it and facing it are two different things.”

“I need to do this, Clay,” she said simply.

Clay stared down at his large hands, dirty because he’d just come from clearing the irrigation ditches. “Grace, I wish I could let you do what you want. I can’t tell you how much I regret…”

“What?” she prompted.

He didn’t continue. But Grace understood. He felt responsible for what had happened that terrible night when he was supposed to have stayed to watch out for her. She’d tried on various occasions to tell him that she’d been living in hell long before that. That under the circumstances, any other sixteen-year-old kid probably would’ve run off with his friends, just as Clay had. Why not? Barker wasn’t at home, not at first. Clay hadn’t even known what was at stake.

But the consequences of her brother’s actions were so great, she couldn’t convince him.

Maybe that was because, to a certain extent, she blamed him almost as much as he blamed himself. If only he had remained with her and Molly that night, as Irene had asked him to, maybe the reverend wouldn’t have been in that mood and had the opportunity to take things so far.

Tasting bile at the back of her throat, Grace grabbed her purse. She did pretty well as long as she remained at Evonne’s, or in town. But being at the farm was too difficult.

She turned to go but hesitated when she saw her brother’s head hanging down. She wanted to comfort him. Why should they both suffer? His age at the time, his innocence, had to count for something, didn’t it?

Forcing herself to drop her purse, she reached deep, beyond her own pain, and knelt in front of him. “That wasn’t the first time, Clay,” she admitted when their eyes met. “What Barker did…” She struggled for breath because, even now, if felt as though her stepfather had his hand on her throat. “It got worse with each encounter. He—he would’ve killed me eventually. I honestly believe that. He couldn’t have kept what he was doing hidden for much longer. It was too…s-sick.”

The sympathy and regret in her brother’s face expanded the ache in her chest. She wanted to let Clay’s love wash over her, heal her. Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t to blame for what Barker had done. But her emotions contradicted what her brain told her. She felt she must have done something to cause what had happened to her. After all, the reverend had never hurt Molly or Madeline.